Zeocode – Simplifying location sharing for businesses in India

One of the obvious things a tourist does when travelling to another city is to source a street map of that place. But if you’re going on an expedition in India, and decide to set on with just a map, a few postal addresses and street names – chances are that you will either be lost or end up in having a set of directions in your head which go like “From the main road turn left at the mandir, go straight till you reach a paan shop, make a right over there and then look for the bus stop and it’s the third house on the left after the bus stop”.

This does not happen just with the newbies in India. You operate an eCommerce store and you’ll find your delivery man regularly asking for a ‘landmark’ or ‘directions’ – thanks to the anachronistic distribution of addresses in the country. Looking at this, Zeocode, a Chennai based startup has come up with a simplified address sharing solution.

Zeocode is bitly of postal address and maps locations in 10 digits. You can share your Zeocode instead of dictating your postal address & giving directions to your place with a “One number, Share anywhere” approach.

Zeocode is easy to create, share and remember unlike a Google URL or any other location sharing application and its API allows third party services to fetch the postal address and map the location of a place in no time. The startup is focusing on food delivery, eCommerce and taxi companies at the moment. But, we believe that the product offers a significant potential for a variety of businesses including logistic companies, ambulance services and even tourism.

With Zeocode, the users would spend much less time while communicating/typing their address and avoid giving directions over phone. Zeocode provides an API to enterprises to fetch their customers’ address and locate their place on maps. Businesses can get their Zeocode, which can be used as a method of sharing address. “You would not want your food to be delivered cold or a product shopped at your online store delivered at a wrong address and we understand that” said Anand Sukumaran, founder, Zeocode.

Currently bootstrapped, the startup claims to be having its full focus on acquiring users and enterprise customers rather than money.

Talking about the competition, Zeocode team said that there are few location sharing applications, check out the following table for comparison –

The company started working on Zeocode since June 2013 and launched the public beta in mid July 2013. It acquired its first 1000 users in less than a month. The team has recently made a few fundamental changes in Zeocode which includes, moving from 9 to 10 digits and started allowing users to choose their own Zeocode. They are also launching an embeddable widget to integrate Zeocode with businesses around this month end.

I am Dev, a New Delhi, India, based travel blogger and photographer. Shortly after my first nine to five job, I left that lifestyle behind, and with that everything that didn't fit in my backpack. It has been more than two years now since I've quit my job to travel, and during the process I've learned that this world is too big and interesting to stay at once place.